Crowdsourcing Creativity and Community at IDS2011

Crowdsourcing, or "tapping talent from the crowd" is a controversial subject in the design community. Some think it to be evil, a way of getting a lot of ideas for free. One critic ranted that crowdsourcers "have managed to figure out a way to get thousands of people -- some skilled enough to earn a decent living -- to work for them gratis. It's an amazing sleight-of-hand." Yet one only has to look at the entries in the LifeEdited competition, where the design of Graham Hill's apartment is being crowdsourced, to find an explosion of ideas from people all over the world, that we never would have heard from, talked to, got excited by.

Is crowdsourcing helping or hindering creativity? How are crowdsourcing and open source contributing to design for social change? These are just a few of the issues and questions that will be debated by 10 international thinkers who will share their practical experiences with crowdsourcing and open source design as it relates to humanitarian projects and commercial design.

The speakers are pretty amazing, including a few familiar to TreeHugger: